Abstract : Although tags play a critical role in many social media,
their link to the geographic distribution of user generated
videos has been little investigated. In this paper, we ana-
lyze the correlation between the geographic distribution of
a video’s views and the tags attached to this video in a
Youtube dataset. We show that tags can be interpreted as
markers of a video’s geographic diffusion, with some tags
strongly linked to well identified geographic areas. Based
on our findings, we explore whether the distribution of a
video’s views can be predicted from its tags. We demon-
strate how this predictive power could help improve on-line
video services by preferentially storing videos close to where
they are likely to be viewed. Our results show that even with
a simplistic approach we are able to predict a minimum of
65.9% of a video’s views for a majority of videos, and that
a tag-based placement strategy can improve the hit rate of
a distributed on-line video service by up to 6.8% globally,
with an improvement of up to 34% in the USA.